“Katie Couric is taking serious flak over the edited version of an interview with gun supporters in a documentary,” Washington Free Beacon reports. “In Under the Gun, Couric asks the group, ‘If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?’ As this video shows, the question is met by dumbfounded silence. But . . .

the Washington Free Beacon obtained audio of the interview, and it shows that people responded immediately to the question, including one man who said, “One, if you’re not in jail, you should still have your basic rights.”

Couric got caught with her proverbial pants down on this one. Her response — I suck — is both true and besides the point. She knew what she was doing. And progressives wonder why conservatives view the anti-gun rights mainstream media with unbridled contempt.

Yeah, I found that little bit fairly concerning as well. Mr. Lott’s studies have been found to be very reliable and with lots of quality data, and the studies that refute Lott’s findings have been shown to be anywhere from poor to flat-out lies.

Funny she even sat in “Rather’s” chair every night for months, until the rating dropped so bad CBS couldn’t handle it anymore.
Failed talk show
Failed news Anchor
Failed Documentary maker
Nobody cares about what ever she did? at YAHOO

I think the world has seen enough of her, time to fade to black, Katie
and just disappear.

Yeah, I think TMZ is actually WAY more responsible journalists than many other sources. Why? They would get sued so often by the rich and famous they make sure to have a source to attribute things to, and don’t engage in much conjecture, so as to remain shielded from slander/libel suits.

I wish I had a source to attribute that to; someone who had researched (or worked there). But take their news for a spin, and see for yourself how they mostly state things.

TMZ might have a lot of in house and/or outside freelancers getting their stories, Some of the stories might even be a bit dingy,
but they usually always get it right.. They are not creating “fictitiously constructed
truths (lies)”.

I have hated her for years after watching her badger an expert on extremists she brought on to the Today Show after a gay teenager was found killed in a farm field. She kept trying to get him to say that it was the fault of the religious right. But he wouldn’t do it. So she would rephrase the question another way. Then he called her out on it. I was happy when her nightly news show tanked in the ratings.

For us who spend the time to validate truthfulness in what we read, the mainstream media lost nearly all credibility. I have learned that everything they report comes with a political agenda, that everything they say is Democrat Party propaganda.

She (and other “journalists”) needs to be discredited when they pull this crap. Otherwise, they will continue to pull the same BS over and over again. Of course, it may not matter at this point since her ‘movie’ already received such glowing reviews by other “journalists” and the rest of the Lame Stream Media. They all prop each other up and fawn all over themselves in order to promote their message. It makes me sick that so many people just lap it up and accept it at face value.

I absolutely agree with Ralph and DG. Record you own interview. Better yet, record it with 2 separate devices. Let the recording be known so that you don’t face legal entanglements in the future. If that is “unacceptable,” than decline the interview.

I’ve done this for investigation of serious crimes, civil depositions and for administrative investigations that could result in adverse action or termination. Having transcripts made is another good option, although unnecessary here.

Well – it was never a documentary. It was an agenda, a mission, of Katie Couric to push what she wants on the American people. What she thinks is fact and what she thinks is morally right in this case is just her opinion, and she is looking to force feed us this by means of propaganda and subsequent legislation.

Then please explain why states with high gun ownership have the highest violent crimes and suicide rates compared to IL, NY, CA, HI, NJ where violence crimes and suicides is very low. Trying to say these states have higher crime and incidents are a loud of crap as it’s been found these places are safe.

ReadyforMonica has posted here before. S/he is anti-gun and trying to make us see the light.

Go ahead, RFM. Please post your citation. I’ll post mine. Please note all of these states have few gun restrictions. So much for your correlation. If you would like to live in Oakland or Chiraq, be my guest. I’m staying here in my “safe state.”

We here in Wyoming have one of the two highest rates of gun ownership in the nation.

We have a violent crime rate lower than most any major city in Canada, a lower rate of violent rape than most any major city in Europe (and especially now that the Saracens are being brought in by the boatload) and we generally have little to no gun crime. The morning news show today was going on and on about the first big violent crime of this year – no guns, no knives, just fists. Aggravated assault is the charge, and the doofus who was involved is going to Rawlins for a long damn time.

Want to dispense with most violent crime in the US? Move somewhere in the US where the population is overwhelmingly white, and you will have lost most of your violent crime stats immediately, regardless of gun ownership. That’s a fact, jack, and there’s no way to spin it away.

Please explain why Inglewood, California has a drastically higher murder rate than culver city or Marina del Ret even though they are neighboring cities with the exact same gun laws that are essentially the same exact distance from a neighboring state. Or, why are Compton and south central gun related violence figures multiple times higher than that of Beverly Hills? These cities are all in California. South central even has stricter gun control laws than Beverly Hills.

Sure. Safe like Chicago, Newark And Camden. Where the hell are you from? The major cities in this country which have the strictest gun laws have seen spikes in violent crime. And as for suicides, try Portland or Seattle during the rainy season.

I swear the control freak sheep are projecting their Kool-Aid drinking onto the rest of us.

Then, please explain why there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rates and suicide or crime, and states like IL, NY, CA, HI, and NJ actually have similar crime and suicide rates to TX, VT, VW, WA, and UT. Trying to say these statesare safer is a load of horseshit as it’s been these places are demonstrably unsafe.

Florida is not included because it does not appear in Table 20 of the FBI’s UCR Data Tables.
Alabama is not included due to limited homicide and supplemental weapons data.

Please explain to me how gun control actually failed everywhere it’s been tried — including Australia, Japan, and all of Europe.

As you may know, many Australians (and people from all around the world in general) think that your country (among others) is a role model that the U.S. should follow. However, two very important studies of your 1996 National Firearms Agreement completely disagree with this statement.

A ten-year study, lead by Dr. Samara McPhedran and published in the British Journal of Criminology, found that the $500M AUD spent on the mass confiscation and destruction of previously-legal firearms had absolutely no effect whatsoever on homicide or suicide rates.

Yet another five-year study, produced by Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi from your University of Melbourne and published in the Melbourne Institute’s Working Paper series, confirmed Dr. McPhedran’s conclusions and no others.

Dr. McPhedran even testified to this fact before a recent Australian Senate Inquiry, which had looked into – among other things – banning semi-automatic handguns. Needless to say , gun control advocates were rightly and completely humiliated.

Before that same Senate Inquiry, Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Julian Slater had freely admitted that not only do they have no clue what exactly what kinds of contraband were getting through, but they only know about what they somehow by some miracle manage to intercept. As I’m sure you may be well aware, and even if you’re not you will be now, Australia’s porous borders and low population density – coupled with deeply corrupt postal and customs services – make it a veritable smuggler’s paradise.

More analyses of U.S. domestic and Australian gun control laws have been done besides the brilliant work of Dr. McPhedran, and Wang-Sheng and Saudri, on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. Their findings match those of the former researchers almost exactly.

A Deputy Director from the Australian Institute of Criminology also testified before the Senate Inquiry, and explicitly stated that only 5 of the 48,000+ handguns in the Australian state of Victoria had been stolen. To complicate matters further, the AFP even admitted they had not even bothered to examine the AIC’s report on gun thefts at all.

After the Port Arthur shooting, there were also the Quakers Hill and Childer’s Palace arson attacks, the Black Saturday Bushfires – which were deliberately lit in case you needed a reminder – the Cairns Stabbings, the Lockhart Shooting, and the Monash University Shooting. The 1996 NFA didn’t stop the massacres from happening, but only changed the methods in which they are carried out. Especially not when many thousands of guns handed over to the government for destruction in 1996 were then illegally resold to criminals – many of which have still never been recovered, and have very likely been used in crimes since. Some were indeed recovered though, in the private collections of police officers.

Isn’t it any wonder that only after the states of Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania were excluded from all crime statistics reports by both the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Criminology from 2010 onwards there begins an appreciable drop in Australia’s violent crime rates across the board?

Indeed, wonders never cease. Especially when criminals receive hundreds of pistols at a time through the mail and several times every year, made especially easy by Australia’s institutionalized corruption of its Customs services – not to mention that of individual officials, as well.

Even if criminals couldn’t receive their guns through the Sunday Post, they can just as easily make them or have them made-to-order. These aren’t those shoddy rusticles of zip-guns you’d expect to find in a jail cell, either, but finely machined MAC-11 sub-machine guns – complete with 32-round magazines and silencers.

In conclusion, no, America would not benefit from Australia’s gun control laws. (Even Australia didn’t seem to benefit from them.) This is for a wide variety of reasons. Given the level of sophistication of the criminal enterprises that were created by Prohibition in the U.S., and now during the morbidly hilarious failure of the “War on (Some) Drugs” around the world, the only logical conclusion that can be drawn about a prohibition on guns – which is what you have by-and-large in Australia – is that equally large and sophisticated criminal enterprises will arise to fulfill the demand for guns. This can, as quite thoroughly demonstrated above if I do say so myself, can and will be accomplished in a number of ways: clandestine domestic manufacture, surreptitious importation from abroad, and widespread theft.

Australia is plagued by the first and the second. America is plagued by the second and third.

To give you an example of the futility of banning an item to which is attached very high demand, some 1.6 million pounds of marijuana was seized by the U.S. DEA in 2010 – and that’s only a very small percentage of what is believed to have made it across the border. It is reasonable to assume that the shear amount of arms, ammunition, and accoutrement that can occupy the same space as 800 tons of plant matter is quite sufficient to arm a significant portion of the U.S. criminal element.

These dreadful shortcomings demonstrate a basic and willful failure of Prohibitionists to understand or even acknowledge the market forces governing anything for which there is significant demand. It is the primary reason why central economic planning has only proved an unmitigated disaster everywhere it’s been tried. More basically, they fail to realize or consciously ignore the fact that when people want something, someone will get it for them. The harsher the ban, the higher the profit motive. The higher the profit motive, the more risks criminals will be willing to take to satisfy their market. There are deeper reasons for this failure than simply flat-out flunking ECON 101. Those who trade in prohibited goods are, by definition, criminals who are engaged in a criminal enterprise without the benefits of redress the courts or any other avenue of dispute resolution or of police protection. When an enterprise can’t: take out a loan, open a bank account, establish credit, file a lawsuit, or have police respond to an alarm, it becomes necessarily more violent to protect its financial and territorial interests and to affect resolutions over contractual disputes. Essentially, prohibition of highly desirable goods can only function to increase overall violence and disregard for the law as a basic factor of prohibition. One must accept this as a basic premise and then try to reconcile the increased violence and criminality coupled with the inevitable encroachment on individual liberty with any perceived utility of the prohibition.

As the world slowly comes to the realization that prohibition of drugs, with the focus now being primarily on marijuana and cannabis, has very little if any utility in the face of extremely high demand we begin to move away from banning it.

Considering that those who smuggle, steal, and manufacture weapons and their customers will obviously still be armed, the level of violence in the wake of an Australian-style prohibition would be unprecedented. Once one factors in the unique culture surrounding guns and civil rights in the U.S., the increasingly ubiquitous support for the Second Amendment and the right it protects, and American’s historical resistance to tyranny, the violence may very well escalate into that of armed insurrection.

Mass civil disobedience is already the order of the day, and police departments are already realizing the logistical absurdity of such an endeavor in actually enforcing registration or, Heaven forbid, a mass confiscation. In fact, many law enforcement officials have already announced their intentions to not enforce such laws at all.

Also given that firearms are very durable items, with many examples lasting 500 years or more with proper care and maintenance, and that upwards of 363 million (as of 2013) are already thought to be present in the hands of up to 124 million Americans, it’s highly unlikely that any prohibition would succeed at all as confiscation must immediately follow – as it did in Australia – to realize any utility at all.

All this having been said, advocacy for prohibition of firearms can only be seen as either ill informed (as in being simply unaware of the consequences) or malicious (aware of the inevitable and invariable failure of the prohibition and the increased criminality and violence and potential to destabilize society and government and possibly to result in violent revolution). It’s either one or the other. There is NO third option.

Please explain to me how taking guns away — which is as a matter of fact the ultimate end goal of gun control no matter what you say — will reduce homicide rates despite the fact that statistics prove otherwise.

You have to explain this to us, because we’ve already explained to you how and why you’re categorically wrong. You don’t get to ask any questions unless and until you answer ours.

States with high gun ownership do NOT have higher violent crime rates. They DO have higher suicide rates, largely due to rural, isolated nature and lack of services to prevent suicide compared to a densly populated area. Anti-gun people combine these acts in to one in order to drive their agenda. Suicide is not violent crime.

The same issue in Australia where suicide rates among the rural population are many times the national average. Likely factors are the lack of counseling services available in these areas, which may be only available in the bigger towns which can be hundreds (note multiple) of miles or kilometres away (or up to a day-plus in driving), the isolation of many rural properties, the availability of the means of suicide (rope, poisons, guns, etc), and the culture of manning up and keeping emotions hidden from anyone including close family.

ReadyforMonica16. Although I’m from Texas, I’m very much a fact-driven thinker. And at least as it pertains to perspective, I think it’s relevant to point out that I’ve lived in both Texas and California. After reading the underlying article and many of the comments contained at the end, I thought I’d take just a few minutes to REVIEW the data referenced by that very same article, to see if what I’ve heard about TX and CA are accurate. Since I didnt have hours to dig deeper, I simply thought that the best place to start was total himicides per capita, because I’ve heard so many people pound their fist on the table while saying “then how is it that CA is so much safer than TX”, which is one of the points you exalted, right? After all, maybe there is some substantial and meaningful difference in the two states I’ve lived in my entire life. But to be clear, I’m a proud Texan, but I’m not stupid, nor do I assume that other people’s interpretation of data makes their interpretation factual. Hence my decision to take a quick look at the data. So, how did CA and TX compare? It’s not even close to how you and other SHEEPLE like you have represented it. There’s a 3.85% difference in homicides per capita between TX and CA. You don’t need to re-read the sentence again — A 3.85% DIFFERENCE. And that’s one of your underlying data points? i presume there’s a margin of error involved, but I’m just a law-abiding, responsible gun owner from Texas, so I’m probably just stupid, so before we tackle and index every single data point (because I’m happy to dig through the data and show the math) to further the debate, I’d sincerely appreciate you responding to this one particular data point comparison. I know that there are many other factors involved and a slew of accompanying data points, but we have to start somewhere. And this will show everyone how you represent your side of the debate, and how I represent my side of the debate. Once we’ve done that, I’m happy to take each and every data point, perform the math and share the results — then all of us can truly see what’s factual and what’s not, rather than relying on someone that’s writing an article, blog or words for a reporter to read, that they are really doing the math and not being lazy…or unable to be objective in light of their own beliefs. I can be objective, and I hope you can too, as my mind is open to learning the real facts. I was going to remove my “SHEEPLE” reference that I included in response to your similar comments about that and kool-aid. But I’m leaving it in, with the commitment to resist the urge to call you or your side names or belittle the same in any way, at least until we’ve plowed through each and every data point and heard how that MAY have changed our respective beliefs. Feel free to take a data point and advance it for my consideration — I’ll respond to it, just as you should to the one I advanced above. Btw, my name is Mark.

Dude,
You wasted WAY too many kilobytes and time responding to that f#$%ing troll…. He/she won’t even read your response; it’s already posted troll shit on the next NRA or Everytown thread on Facebook. Nothing but “drive-bys” from that POS. Enjoy a cold TX beer and don’t even bother next time.

Couric is a standard unit of measurement for mass weight of feces. According to European Fecal Standards and Measurements Institute (EFSMI) one Katie Couric is about two and a half pounds of excrement. The original record was set in 1960 at 7.5 Couric

She may well be in inadequate in many ways, but in this instance, she’s just a liar trying to cover her tracks. It reminds me of the same argument that Hillary’s making about her private server and her supposed ignorance of emails and cell phones. Give me a break.

However, even Michael Moore, to my knowledge, has never stooped to the kind of baldfaced lying these filmmakers pulled. Moore is a talented, skilled filmmaker, and he would have let the VCDL have their say, then rebut them or show some dead babies or whatever. What Couric and Soechtig did makes “Broadcast News” look quaint and endearing.

So second point: ALWAYS make your own record. If the filmmakers or reporters don’t want you to, something is amiss. The VCDL is one smart group and kudos to them for covering their asses and getting the word out. I even read this story on NPR (they said this tactic would not have flown on NPR). Spread this far and wide, everyone.

You mean the same Michael Moore who opened a bank account, opted for the free rifle instead of the free disc player or whatever as his “gift”, went to the FFL and did the NICS check and picked up his rifle, then filmed himself standing in front of the bank with it and letting on that it had simply been handed to him like one of the peppermints from the candy dish? That Michael Moore, who wouldn’t “stoop so low”?

I didn’t see that movie, nor do I have plans to. I liked Roger and Me, for all its lack of subtlety. I swore I would watch Fahrenheit 911, but never made the time. Yes, that is deceptive if that’s what he did. It would have been a hoot if they’d denied him.

He made Bowling for Columbine and gun sales shot up. He made Fahrenheit 911 and Bush got re-elected. Maybe we should let him go about his merry business.

That’s exactly what he did; someone talked to the bank president afterwards, who explained that the gift was in the form of a voucher redeemable at an FFL, who of course had to do a background check. None of which, of course, appeared in Moore’s “documentary”. You give him waaaay too much credit, in my opinion.

Awesome that she was caught and the story was picked up, even by transgressive rags like WaPo that use it as an opp to spread anti-gun propaganda. Still, it’s not over until this transgressive is out of work — and the right hasn’t organized sufficiently to even mount a campaign.

She use to hate being called cute and she isn’t that any longer. She isn’t a competent propagandist since she got caught and held up for mockery. Clearly that title is beyond her. So what do we call not cute little Katie?

Wow. I listened to the audio because I was curious. What a FLAME_OMMITTED. She purposely tried to lead them into answers she wanted. And when that didn’t work, she just edited in the answer she wanted instead. Horrible. Unconscionable.

Or maybe ABC, which oh-so-skillfully hid Zimmerman’s cranial injuries under the text banner at the top of the screen, then reported that “photos show no evidence of injury to Zimmerman”. Sadly for ABC, there were already plenty of photos showing clear injuries in circulation, so when they were called out on it they did another report using what they were pleased to call “enhanced” photography (i.e. not hidden by screen text) to say, Oh yeah, I guess he was injured after all.

I’ve never watched ANYTHING she’s done, including the video above, since her repulsive “interview” with the wife of a mountain climber almost immediately after he’d died while climbing out west somewhere. She had just gotten off the phone with him for a last conversation. His body hadn’t even been recovered yet and Couric was jabbering with her. I’m not sure who I was most disgusted with; Couric, or the wife of the guy who subjected herself to the spectacle.

The old media lies – by omission, by actual deliberate lying, by editing vidieos and recordings (George Zimmerman 911 call) – anything is allowed to promote the “progressive” agenda. They are all liars, in the newspapers, on the TV, anywhere. Ignore them.

Just another story about a pro-gun control advocate and how any feeble excuse for shoddy work or incorrect information will be ignored by the “truth seeking” press, because the end justifies the means.

Reminds me about the politician (Congresswoman?) who thought her proposed “high capacity” magazine ban would work, because she thought these magazines were a single use item and how that was also ignored by the press.